Video Essay: How to do Visual Comedy

In this video essay, Tony Zhou identifies how director Edgar Wright, (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Paul) creates visual comedy through his use shot type, composition, sound design and editing. As we are creating a comedy film with similar characters to those that feature in Wright's films, and we are aiming similarly to create comedy through editing and visual juxtaposition, the video is appropriate and useful for my research. Below I have summarized the main points he raises:

• American comedies in particular are not using the full potential of visuals and sound to deliver jokes - all jokes are delivered through dialogue, not visuals. 'They are lightly disguised improv... everyone just stands still and talks at each other in close-up'
• Edgar Wright finds the comedy in the simplest actions such as transitions from one location to another.
• Easy option to use generic music, screen moves from right to left and have obvious landmarks.
• Fast cut sequence in 'Hot Fuzz' (Edgar Wright, 2007) contains narrative meaning in the shots.

1. Taxi shots show where he has come from and where he is going.

2. Shots of phone signal dropping show the move away from civilisation

3. Main character is always facing forward or to the right so screen direction is respected.

• Can get a laugh just through staging or through a camera movement: zoom, crane up or pan. 
• 'Cinema is a matter of whats in the frame and not in the frame' - Scorsese.
• Edgar Wright makes use of funniness of things entering/leaving the frame, dramatic lighting cues, matching scene transitions and well-timed sound effects. 

In this video Wright explains his choices for using close-ups in his films, with stemmed from a parody of the 'tooling-up' montages from generic action films. 

• 'In Hot Fuzz, the idea was to subvert that by taking the most boring parts of police work like paperwork and making it super-stylized... approaching it in the way that Michael Bay or Tony Scott would'

• 'When there are transitions, its a way of you being in control of the rhythm... the scenes all have beginnings middles and ends.'
• Wright would actually black out the sets at the ends of some scenes to confirm that it is the final shot of line of dialogue, 'like a theatrical blackout.'
• 'My first film... I never got enough coverage for it. I never shot enough that I could cut away to so I couldn't control the pace. So I'm always looking at different ways to keep the pace in films, and close-ups are a good way of doing that. It forces the edits of stuff that you'd cut out anyway.'
• 'Always the shots that would fall off the schedule would be close-ups. I would spend an hour during call and during my lunch hour shooting close-ups, so that's about 6 shots per day'